Beyond Personhood An Essay in Trans Philosophy

A bold intervention in the philosophical concepts of gender, sex, and self Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity. Until now, trans experience has overwhelmingly been understood in terms of two reductive frameworks: trans people are either "trapped in the wrong body" or they are oppressed by the gender binary. Both accounts misgender large trans constituencies while distorting their experience, and neither can explain the presentation of trans people as make-believers and deceivers or the serious consequences thereof. In Beyond Personhood, Talia Mae Bettcher demonstrates how taking this phenomenon seriously affords a new perspective on trans oppression and trans dysphoria--one involving liminal states of "make-believe" that bear positive possibilities for self-recognition and resistance. Undergirding this account is Bettcher's groundbreaking theory of interpersonal spatiality--a theory of intimacy and distance that requires rejection of the philosophical concepts of person, self, and subject.